Some years ago, a young Muslim cleric walked into my office at the Islamic World Academy of Sciences (IAS) in Amman, Jordan. He objected to what he had read in some of our books about the status of science and technology in the Muslim world. He insisted that Muslims had made great discoveries in science, and the Muslim world had enormous wealth, agricultural and minerals resources, land mass and human capital, and that it was doing much better than the West in all domains